Dead Reckoning by Michael Baden and Marion Roach, Simon & Schuster,
$25, ISBN 0684867583
NEW YORK City鈥檚 Office of Chief Medical Examiner is a busy place now, but
Michael Baden has written a book about less violent times, when people died one
by one and he was called to investigate the cases. Baden has spent 40 years
performing autopsies, exhuming corpses and scouting crime scenes. Dead Reckoning
conveys his enthusiasm, even delight, in tasks that make hardened detectives
faint and send most people scurrying away.
Baden鈥攚ho wrote Dead Reckoning with science writer Marion
Roach鈥攄iscovered his calling while still in medical school, doing a stint
at Bellevue Hospital鈥檚 morgue: 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 understand why everyone didn鈥檛 want
to work there. I loved that morgue.鈥� He has had a colourful career, working on
such famous cases as the Kennedy assassination, O. J. Simpson and the killing of
Martin Luther King.
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Along with these anecdotes about the famous, Baden provides a primer in
forensic science and also has lots of criticism to offer: of ill-trained
coroners, and, especially, of forensic scientists who give false testimony in
court, usually to aid prosecutors.